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Are your New Year's resolutions still intact?

It’s been a week. How many of your New Year’s resolutions are still intact?

With the new year, people join fitness clubs, start diets, throw away their cigarettes and pour out the last of the hard stuff. But not right away. Our first sit-down meal of the New Year, at least at the Dickson house, had to be a big one with the traditional black-eyed peas, collards, some kind of hog meat and sweet potatoes.

But some are trying hard. We’re talking beads of sweat. I passed a fitness club on St. Simons Thursday morning and the parking lot looked like the mall the day after Thanksgiving, absolutely packed.

Fig, a company in Chicago, has a new clock to help you keep your resolutions and live a better life. The ALARMclock has a digital readout and is made for the bedside table. Instead of telling you how much time you have left to get to work or church, it tells you three other things: how much money you have in savings; the number of friends you have online; and how much time you have left to live.

Ryan Gury, one of the clock’s creators, said this on NPR’s Morning Edition on Jan. 1: “It’s a reminder of you’re only here for a little bit and you really have to make everything matter.”

Could there be anything more depressing than knowing how long you have left to live? ALARMclock owners would fill out a questionnaire with their habits, their family history and other questions that could be used with actuarial tables to compute death dates.

It sounds a little like living on death row without the bars and the padre. At least the people with death sentences have Yale law school grads with ponytails and corduroy suits filing appeals for them.

You could probably add some time by dropping some bad habits, but you wonder how much consideration the actuarial experts give to morons weaving in and out of traffic on I-95 at 80 mph.

I think one of the questions that go into computing life expectancy should be, How many times in the past year have you used this phrase: Hold my beer, Now, watch this.

Perhaps the most useless information is the number of online friends.

What do you do when you wake up to discover you’ve been unfriended by 15 people on Facebook? Does that take eight more hours off your life? Is it even a cause for alarm?

How many Internet friends are going to bring jumper cables to the mall, help you find your golf ball in the weeds, put a comforting hand on your shoulder at a funeral and laugh at your lame jokes?

They just send a worthless lol text. I prefer people who lolip (laugh out loud in person).

Enjoy the rest of your year – and the rest of your life – with friends you can see.